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Saturday, 9 January 2010

It's January; the start of a new year and in this case a new decade. I've survived the national binge-drinking season and made a new year's resolution never to make any more new year's resolutions. That doesn't mean I can't start to do something different though.

I've been dabbling with programming in several languages and multiple flavours of each over the last twenty years or so but never actually got round to finishing anything, so this year I'm going to knock that habit on the head. In an attempt to find inspiration I've written an entry for the Experimental Gameplay Project, the theme of which is currently "100 things".

After struggling to come up with an idea I found myself thinking along the lines of a traditional twin-stick shooter. However, there's a huge problem when it comes to the theme. You need to shoot, which usually requires the creation of a sprite, which would increase the total amount of objects on-screen by one. Instead, I began to picture a world where your ammo was always visible, circling your avatar until it was time to use it.

That led to another problem however; if your aim is to kill people or objects, you'll end up reducing the amount of objects on the game-field. So, what if things weren't killed, but incapacitated? That's where the idea behind Denature came from.

It took two days to program and one day to fix some irritating deployment bugs that turned out to be down to my own stupidity, so I'm hoping to spend some of the next few days tidying things up a little before I submit it. We're allowed a time limit of seven days, but I think I'll probably have done all that I want with it by about day five.